The Next George Bush

It’s an unseasonably warm midwinter day when a giant blue campaign bus arrives at a downscale strip mall in Pasadena, Texas, announcing the imminent return of a Republican dynasty. George Prescott Bush, the scion of arguably the most successful political family in American history, is launching a statewide bus tour that will introduce him to public prominence as he runs for commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, an important but generally obscure statewide position.

Bush is a lock: He faces no serious challengers, a fact attributable largely to the overwhelming advantages that accompany his name. Come November, the handsome, studious and half-Hispanic 37-year-old George P. will walk into public office, and a choir of observers will begin a round of intense speculation about what his ascensionmeans for his party, his state and his country.

One might think the Bushes had acclimatized themselves to public recognition by now. Yet there’s Pierce Bush, another nephew of former President George W., fleece-jacketed and playful-seeming as he circles the giant bus emblazoned with a huge blowup of George P.’s face, taking pictures with his phone. “It’s not every day you see your cousin on one of these,” he tells me. He seems proud—and a bit incredulous.

Inside the strip mall, the small office of the San Jacinto Republican Women is packed. Older women stand around chatting about P.—his resemblance to different members of the Bush family and the well-being of Barbara Bush, George P.’s grandmother, who recently told the nation it should forget the dynasty thing and look outside of the “Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes” for a new generation of leaders. Her grandson seems not to have taken the message personally; asked about it at another campaign stop, George P. said that Barb was talking mostly about the presidency.

Bush has been campaigning with a calculatedly low profile for months, but this six-week, statewide bus tour, starting a month before early voting begins for the March primary, is something of a coming-out party. While land commissioner is an important post—the office oversees Texas’s oil-rich public lands—campaign events for the position usually have as much pomp and circumstance as a rotary club meeting in a dry county. Today, though, there’s a lot of enthusiasm, with even the manicurists at next-door Orchid Nails, who do not speak much English, recognizing the Bush name and coming over to have their picture taken with the candidate.

When George P. finally takes the microphone, he speaks for just over two minutes. It’s a speedy pitch, laden with slabs of red meat for the GOP faithful—proof that he has adopted the rhetorical style of the state’s Tea Party faction. “Our state’s values and our future is under attack, and this attack is being led by one man and one man only, and that’s Barack Obama. He wants to bring his liberal progressive agenda to the shores of Texas. And I think we sum up our message to him and Wendy Davis in just two words,” he says. “No way.” He goes on to speak about guns and the Second Amendment, partial-birth abortion and renewing the state's pride in its petrochemical industry—none of which falls even remotely under the purview of the land commissioner.

No one seems to mind. Afterward, P. poses for pictures and makes the rounds in the shopping center. Then he departs for well-heeled fundraisers in downtown Houston.

***

When people talk about George P.’s potential, they’re talking about two things. First, there’s his name. For those keeping score: George P. is son of Jeb Bush, governor of Florida; nephew of George W. Bush, former president and governor of Texas; grandson of George H.W. Bush, former president; great-grandson of Prescott Sheldon Bush, senator from Connecticut; and great-great-grandson of Samuel Prescott Bush, the patriarch.

Spend time with George P.’s campaign, and it quickly becomes apparent how impossible it is to separate his identity from his family background. Even the campaign photographer working the bus tour, David Valdez, has been shooting Bushes for three decades.

A lot of people develop an early interest in politics, but few have led a political party’s national convention in the Pledge of Allegiance at age 12, as P. did in 1988. | Ron Edmonds/AP Photo

When it comes to the Bush legacy, George P. plays a balancing act. It’s a huge asset, of course, and it lends excitement to what would otherwise be a dull campaign. But he attempts to differentiate himself from the family in ways large and small. For one, he describes Newt Gingrich as a political role model, and whereas his uncle branded himself a “compassionate conservative,” George P. describes himself as a “movement conservative.” He talks earnestly about how he’s “been interested in politics from a very young age.” A lot of people develop an early interest in politics, but few have led a political party’s national convention in the Pledge of Allegiance at age 12, as P. did in 1988.

Born in Houston in 1976, George P. grew up in Florida but returned to the Lone Star State to attend Rice University (and play on the baseball team there) during his uncle’s first term as governor. He then taught public school back in Florida and worked on W.’s presidential campaign before enrolling at the University of Texas School of Law. He practiced corporate law for a time and touts his experience with two investment firms, as well as his service in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve.

When it comes to the Bush legacy, George P. plays a balancing act. | Doug Mills/AP Photo

In conversation, he deploys careful phrasing to distance himself from the family, while simultaneously keeping them close to mind. When I ask what the Bush name means to him in his current campaign, he replies that “they’ve provided their advice. Some pieces have been heeded, some pieces have not been heeded.” Sometimes, though, his phrasing is less careful. On a number of occasions, he has used the royal “we” to refer to his campaign or his family or both, like when he recently told the Associated Press, “We’re a mainstream conservative that appeals to all Republicans.”

Despite that statement, Bush hasn’t, in fact, asserted himself as a mainstream conservative, instead using the heated rhetoric of the Tea Party. At the Pasadena event, he closed by telling the crowd that they “deserve a future that springs from the wells of freedom dug deep under the ground by the founders of our great republic and the heroes of 1836”—a nod to the Texas revolution.

And yet, while a diverse swath of conservatives in the state has embraced him, some Tea Party activists who associate the Bushes with overspending and failed foreign policy have rejected him out of hand. Morgan McComb, a Dallas-based Tea Party activist, told the AP in December, “A Bush can’t be a true conservative.” P., perhaps empowered by his apparent dominance in the primary, takes that sentiment in stride. “I’ll let the voters make that final assessment as to whether or not I’m a steadfast conservative,” he tells me.

As a candidate for land commissioner, he has spent $680,000—more than 42 times as much money as his primary opponent, an east Texas businessman named David Watts. Bush’s Democratic opponent, former El Paso mayor John Cook, is barely better resourced than Watts. (Bush has more than $2.8 million on hand, while Cook and Watts together have only $2,700.) So if Bush has, essentially, a waterslide to electoral victory, why make such an effort? And why tack so far right?

That’s the curious thing to Wayne Slater, a Bushologist for many years who co-wrote the 2003 book Bush’s Brain, about the political career of Karl Rove, and is now the chief political writer for the Dallas Morning News. (Lately, Slater has made waves for an article about the contested narrative of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis’s life story.)

“He’s going to win that primary anyway,” Slater says of George P. “He doesn’t have to be Mr. Tea Party. But he’s doing it anyway.” Slater wonders if George P. has made the conscious decision to “establish himself as ‘not your grandfather’s George Bush’ from the beginning.” That’s something W. was careful to do as well, using his strong Methodist beliefs and Southern conservative credentials to differentiate himself from the WASPy heritage and Connecticut Republican upbringing of his presidential father, George H.W. George W. “always liked to picture himself as the Bush with a bass boat,” Slater says, “and not the Bush with a sailboat.”

The idea of sweeping self-reinvention invariably plays well here in Texas, where it is a staple of narratives about what makes the state a special place. Members of the Bush family have twice played this card successfully in Texas: H.W., who left the staid Northeast to become an oilman, and W., who went from son of the president to baseball team owner and Texas governor (and back to Crawford rancher). Can George P. become the third?

***

There’s another reason Republicans are looking to George P. Bush, one that comes not from his father’s family, but his mother’s—and in which fellow Republicans see not the past, but the future. Columba Bush, née Garnica Gallo, was born in León, Mexico, and met Jeb while he was there on a foreign exchange program in high school. They married in Austin three years later, in 1974.

George P.’s identity as a half-Hispanic representative of a politically powerful family has defined his entire public life. | Photo courtesy of the author

George P.’s identity as a half-Hispanic representative of a politically powerful family has defined his entire public life, back even to his appearance at the 1988 Republican Convention. Then, a small firestorm erupted over George H.W.’s introduction of George P. and siblings to sitting President Ronald Reagan as “the little brown ones.” George H.W. seemed genuinely hurt and angry that anyone would question his love for his grandchildren, but the affair was an odd spectacle that included Treasury Secretary James Baker telling reporters, “The vice president is extremely proud of the fact that his grandchildren are 50 percent Hispanic.”

Whether or not the attention to George H.W.’s remark was unfair, it fed a perception that Republicans didn’t know how to communicate with America’s burgeoning Hispanic population. Since 1988, that problem has only become more urgent for the GOP—Romney garnered only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, four points lower than McCain’s share in 2008.

George P. Bush talks to voters at the Farmhouse Cafe in Huntsville, Texas, Jan. 22. | Photo courtesy of the author

And nowhere is it more pressing than in Texas. Republicans cannot win the White House without the state’s 38 electoral votes. The time when a Democrat can snatch the state away outright may be far off, but as Texas’s demographics continue to shift—more than two-thirds of the state’s recent population growth has come from Hispanics, who accounted for 38 percent of Texans in the 2010 census—Republicans have to spend more and more money and time on Texas, and less elsewhere.

The only way out of this dire cycle is to increase the party’s share of the Hispanic vote—a prospect made difficult by the GOP’s reputation as a party hostile to immigration and social services. State Rep. James White, one of the rare African-American Republicans in the legislature, came to Livingston, Texas, to stump with Bush, and he put it more succinctly. “The Republican Party needs votes,” he told me. “It has lost the majority vote in a national presidential election five out of the last six times. We need Hispanic votes, we need black votes, we need white votes.”

And this is the cause that George P., for all the new Tea Party rhetoric, is most associated with: Before running for office, in 2010, he co-founded a PAC, the Hispanic Republicans of Texas (HRT), that aims to identify and support Hispanic candidates. Although he has left the group, he is still prominently displayed on the HRT website.

The PAC faces plenty of challenges. For one, Republican pollster Mike Baselice told the Texas Tribune in December that GOP candidates with Hispanic surnames underperform rivals with non-Hispanic surnames by 5 to 10 points. A number of Hispanic Republicans who have been appointed to positions by the governor in recent years have then lost their bids to stay in office in huge upsets. In one infamous case, an Anglo candidate named John Devine challenged an appointed incumbent named David Medina for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court. Two Houston lawyers told the press that Devine had said he was running, in part, because “I can beat a guy with a Mexican last name.” Devine denied he had said it—and won the election.

HRT has had some notable successes. State Rep. Jason Villalba, from Dallas, a gregarious rising star in the state GOP, credits the organization for his 2012 win. Villalba is optimistic that the PAC, and George P.’s campaign, are helping to turn the tide. “What you’re seeing today is this mind-shift,” he says. “There are some in our party that are resistant of that. But I think they’re starting to come terms with it.”

Still, Villalba has had some difficult moments. When the Young Conservatives of Texas planned a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” role-playing game at the University of Texas—organized, strangely, by a young Hispanic leader of the group—Villalba wrote a heartfelt op-ed about how the rhetoric might shape his young daughter’s idea of what it means to be a Latina. And in the legislature, Villalba co-sponsored a non-binding resolution that appropriated language from conservative white papers to call on the federal government to undertake comprehensive immigration reform. The effort failed, and not even the two other Hispanic Republicans in the legislature would help him push it. (Villalba charitably describes the effort as having been stopped by the legislative calendar.)

Even with his emphasis on Tea Party-style political confrontation, George P. has occasionally spoken on the campaign trail about the need for Republicans to empathize with Hispanics. In Corpus Christi, he recently told the Texas Tribune that if Republicans are “going to be successful and be considered credible in the Hispanic community, we’ve got to denounce some of the ignorant statements that are made about Hispanics.”

But Democratic state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, thinks the emphasis on tone is misguided. “George P. deserves recognition for speaking out,” he says. “But there’s an important difference between treating the symptoms and attacking the disease.”

Martinez Fischer points to the 2012 State Republican Party platform. It received positive attention for endorsing a guest worker program. But, he notes, it also endorses the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, says illegal immigrants shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, calls for English to be made the official language of both Texas and the rest of the United States, decries the DREAM Act and rails against early childhood education—all things, Martinez Fischer says, that increase the alienation many Hispanics feel from the GOP. “If you add those up and just say that you’re interested in recruiting Hispanics,” he says, “you’re not going to get very far.”

***

On the third day of George P.’s statewide tour, the big blue bus rolls into Livingston, an idyllic, pine-blanketed east Texas community that happens to house the state’s death row. (Tonight Edgar Tamayo, a Mexican national convicted of killing a police officer, will be executed by the State of Texas, against the wishes of the U.S. State Department.) George P. meetsup withstate Rep. James White at the Polk County Commerce Center. White speaks, cowboy hat in hand. Then Bush. He seems more comfortable, relaxed. He’s a Fort Worthian, he tells the crowd, and Wendy Davis is his state senator. The Democrats are trying to bring “Obama’s progressive agenda” to towns like Livingston, and the hard work of the good people of Polk County can help prevent it. “As quickly as Texas became a red state, it can go blue,” Bush says. “And our enemies at Battleground Texas, who are working in all parts of our state, are doing everything they can to turn this state blue.”

George P. Bush's campaign bus in a shopping center in Pasadena, Texas, on the first leg of a statewide tour, Jan. 14. | Photo courtesy of the author

Later, I ask him about immigration reform. “I stand behind the Republican platform here in the state of Texas, which talks about the need for a guest worker program,” he says. It’s the cautious answer of an executive, the mode in which Bush seems most comfortable. The economic vitality of the state depends on a guest worker program, he says. The rest, he would leave to Washington.

Recently, David Watts, one of Bush’s opponents, made headlines when he called for the children of illegal immigrants to be excluded from public education, in what he said would be a cost-saving measure. It’s an unconstitutional idea—the Supreme Court has ruled that all children must receive equal access to public education—and would never happen.

But Watts’s proposal is less notable as a policy idea than as a bold declaration that the primarily Hispanic children of illegal immigrants should be effectively prohibited from participating in public life. It could also be seen as a not-so-subtle dog whistle that reminds primary voters that his opponent is Hispanic, even if he’s a Republican with an Anglo last name.

When I ask Bush about Watts’s proposal,he responds cautiously, avoiding a discussion of the issue itself or the underlying sentiment. “I stand behind current federal case law,” he says. The Supreme Court ruling “is pretty clear in saying that we have an obligation to educate all children. As somebody who supports the Tenth Amendment and a strict adherence to the constitution, I want to adhere to federal law as it stands.”

With that, George P. shakes a couple more hands and gets back on the big blue bus—and speeds off into his party’s future.